10:00 AM Pacific Time: Monday - Thursday
Letters & Politics seeks to explore the history behind today’s major global and national news stories. Hosted by Mitch Jeserich.
Today, we air a conversation with Pulitzer Prize author and reporter Tony Horowitz in an interview conducted about a week and a half ago talking about a sojourn into the deep South. Tony Horowitz unexpectedly died last Sunday potentially of a heart attack. He wrote extensively throughout his career about the Civil War, and the … Continued
Special counsel Robert Mueller made his first remarks since his report has came out into the 2016 election. And then, he resigned from his appointment as Special Counsel. Today, we bring you his full statement and then we’ll get reaction with guest John Nichols, Washington correspondent of the Nation Magazine.
A conversation with scholar Christina Proenza-Coles about the role that people of African ancestry have played in the formation of the Americas; and not just in the United States but the entire continent. Guest: Christina Proenza-Coles is author of the book American Founders: How People of African Descent Established Freedom in the New World.
In concluding our series of conversations on the ancient world, today, we look at the Caliphates of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries in Baghdad and Cordoba. Guest: Violet Moller is a historian and writer who specializes in intellectual history. She is the author of the book The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History … Continued
More than two thousand years ago, in ancient Rome lived a poet named Lucrecious whose work on the nature of things revolutionized the way people understood the universe. Lucrecious thought that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very … Continued
We continue our series of conversations on the ancient world by looking East and the first global empire of Persia. The first ruler Cyrus the Great, brought by conquest or gentler mean a dominion stretching from the Aegean Sea to the Hindu Kush and encompassing some tens of millions of people. Acclaimed for ruling with … Continued
The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty, and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home. It is about how we find community, how we find who gets to be in a particular community, and what does it mean that some people … Continued
Historians frequently see the late 1900 and earliest century as a period of time that represents the fiercest battle between labor and capital. Today we examine this period to the times of Eugene V. Debs, the perennial socialist candidate who in 1920 ran for president while serving a ten-year jail term for speaking against America’s … Continued
We continue our series of conversations on the history of socialism, this time with Professor and author Gary Dorrien. In this episode, we discuss the American religious tradition of the social gospel and the black social gospel. These traditions would provide the intellectual underpinnings for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Guest: Gary Dorrien is Reinhold … Continued
Today we continue our series of conversations on the history of socialism. In this episode we talk about the raise of socialism and socialist politics, both in Europe and in the United States with Gary Dorrien. Guest: Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and professor of religion … Continued
